Twice-Told Proverbs and the Composition of the Book of Proverbs.

• Author: Crenshaw, James L.

Why do the same and similar proverbial sayings appear in more than one collection within the book of Proverbs? To what extent does this repetition occur and what produced it? These questions underlie Daniel Snell's investigation of twice-told proverbs and their implications for the composition of canonical Proverbs. The hidden agenda, which surfaces only momentarily, concerns the reliability of the biblical material in describing the social and religious circumstances of ancient Israel - as opposed to depicting an Egyptian ethos. Snell's conclusions strengthen the already plausible hypothesis of current research that Proverbs accurately reflects Israelite customs, except for the one short collection of instructions influenced by Amen-em-opet (22:17-23:11).

Although the phenomenon of repetition elicits comment in most discussions of Proverbs, the first extensive examination of it appeared in Yehoshua Grintz, "'The Proverbs of Solomon': Clarification on the Question of the Relation between the Three Collections in the Book of Proverbs Attributed to Solomon," Lesonenu 33 (1968): 243-69. Snell's assessment - and translation of the article into English - gives Grintz the recognition he deserves for launching a significant investigation into the composition of Proverbs, even if Snell's findings contradict Grintz's essential conclusion that the present order of the several collections indicates the historical sequence of their composition.

Not every specialist will accept Snell's isolation of 6:1-19 from the initial collection, 1-9, or his understanding of 14:2616:15 (following Patrick W. Skehan) as a separate collection, although both of these units differ to some degree in both form and content from the larger collections in which they appear. The difficulty in ascertaining the exact criterion linking sayings in any unit compounds the issue. Less controversial is the division of 22:17-24:22 into an "Egyptian" and a Hebrew collection, 22:17-23:11 and 23:12-24:22, respectively. Snell therefore assumes that thirteen collections make up the book of Proverbs, specifically (A) 1:1-5:23, 6:20-9:18; (A6) 6:1-19; (B1) 10:114:25; (B2) 14:26-16:15; (B3) 16:16-22:16; (CE) 22:17-23:11; (CH) 23:12-24:22; (D) 24:23-34; (E) 25:1-29:27; (F1) 30:114; (F2) 30:15-33; (F3) 31:1-9; and (F4) 31:10-31. Notably, he does not divide 25-29 into two separate collections the way Udo Skladny did.

Assuming that these distinct collections existed at one time in isolation, how...